Lavie Tidhar - [BCS314 S02] Read online

  The Drowned God’s Heresy

  By Lavie Tidhar

  1.

  It was early evening on the docks of Vinay-Rin, a hot day with no breeze. Men perspired and dogs slept in the shade. The corpse of a Merlangai merchant rotted in the alleyway under the Sign of the Fish. No one attempted to move it. It smelled like molluscs and shrimp.

  Gorel of Goliris sat at a table at the nearby No Way Inn. He wore his twin guns that bore the seven-pointed star of vanished Goliris. He was clean-shaven, relatively sober, and his boots, for once, were clear of mud. He was everything a half-decent gunslinger ought to be. He was about to go looking for sunken treasure.

  He took a pinch—only a pinch—of the dust they called the Black Kiss and snorted it. He had been keeping the habit under check, recently. Ever since that botched job had taken a somewhat darker turn than he’d expected in that nameless kingdom where the White Queen ruled, when there’d been all that unfortunate business in the forest. He’d been running from his troubles for a while now, since the Zul-Ware’i mountains and the fall of Waterfalling, taking on odd-jobs, bounty hunting or monster killing mostly. All to feed the habit. Buying gods’ dust from the local priests along the way.

  But now he was back. He was focused. His mind was clearer than it’d been for years.

  He sat back, sipping on rice whiskey, waiting for his contact to arrive. He let the conversations carry on around him. The chatter of merchants, pirates, tradesmen and spies. The port city of Vinay-Rin stank like a decomposing, bloated corpse. It was an ugly, old, and ruined place, a cesspit into which drained all the disreputable elements of the World.

  Gorel quite liked it.

  “The shadow from the Black Tor grows ever long,” said a Nocturne sitting in her own pool of darkness. “Since the mage’s forces captured Waterfalling, his influence has grown tenfold.”

  “They say the god of Waterfalling’s dead,” said a white-face. By his scarred cheeks and the company he kept—two silent, carapace-clad insectoid Ebong—Gorel had him pegged as a mercenary. There were a lot more of them around, these days.

  “Waterfalling, the Zul-Ware’i range, mighty Tharat...” The Nocturne counted them out on shadow fingers. “He’s been amassing power like a greedy man hunts for gold.”

  “They say he has no liking for gold, for all that he pays handsomely,” the white-face mercenary said. “That he cares not for money.”

  “Then what?” said the Nocturne.

  The white-face said: “War.”

  There was a lull in the conversation, and a server glided amidst the tables, topping up drinks.

  “War, yes... so I’ve heard,” the Nocturne said. She drummed her fingers on the table. “It could be profitable.”

  The Ebong mercenaries turned helmeted heads. The white-face grinned.

  “But war with whom?” the Nocturne said.

  Gorel watched the others in the room. All sorts sat in the corners, or with their hats pulled down low. All sorts were here to listen, not just to talk. A wizened wizard near the jakes perked up then. He twiddled with an amulet of power round his neck and kept his voice low when he spoke.

  “You heard of Stingbite?” he said.

  The Ebong moved their heads again but didn’t speak. Gorel wasn’t sure the insectoid creatures were capable of producing sound audible to human ears. They communicated mostly by scent. They were vicious, ruthless, hard to kill, and in high demand.

  “What’s Stingbite?” the white-face said.

  “Was,” the wizard said. “What was Stingbite.”

  “All right, what was it?” the white-face said testily.

  “A small outpost on the edge of the Yanivian Desert,” the wizard said. “Out there in Apocrita land. Only it’s not there anymore. Something came out of the desert. Something, or some things. It was a military outpost. They had trained soldiers, wizards too. But whatever it was killed them all.”

  “So what?” the white-face said. “That’s hardly news. People die all the time.”

  “The Apocrita had gods,” the wizard said.

  Gorel had met an Apocrita before. They were benign parasites, colonising and growing on the bodies of other species, riding them and using them as hosts. They were generally considered a highly civilized species, with a fine taste in wine and music and an almost fanatical devotion to the writing of poetry.

  “So why didn’t they do anything about it?” the white-face said.

  The wizard twiddled with his amulet.

  The Nocturne, in her bubble of darkness, said, “Had.”

  “Had?”

  “Had gods.”

  The crowd in the No Way Inn digested this in silence. Gorel closed his eyes. Images, from nowhere, came flooding into his mind.

  The shadows from the desert came to the town. They passed silently, and anything alive they killed. When they came to the temple of the twin gods, an Apocrita priest—the insectoid parasite riding an elderly human body—confronted the invaders, raising a staff, and the stench of sorcery rose in the air, and the ikon of the twin gods came alive then, the gods rising to defend their land against the invaders.

  The shadows neatly cut the priest’s human host’s throat. Then they stomped on the Apocrita itself, leaving a broken carapace lying in a pool of green slime.

  They burned the temple as an afterthought.

  Then they killed everything in their way, slaughtered soldiers and civilians alike, and left the bodies where they fell.

  When dawn came there was nothing left of the town. It had burned to the ground in the night. Of the shadow attackers there was no sign, and when an investigative force arrived, a day later, they could find no trace of where the invaders had gone.

  “Did you say something?”

  “What?” Gorel opened his eyes. They were all staring at him strangely. He shook his head. “You think these are what the Lord of the Black Tor seeks to fight? These... things?”

  The wizard shrugged. “Perhaps. But the World is large and full of strange and inexplicable things. Perhaps the Sacking of Stingbite means nothing.”

  “Did you... hear anything more?”

  The wizard stared closely at Gorel. “A word,” he said. “A whisper out of that desert. A single word.”

  Gorel, his heart constricting: “What was it?”

  The wizard said: “Goliris.”

  2.

  It was heard more and more, these days. That whisper from some place so far removed from this corner of the World, it might well be in another.

  Goliris. That greatest and most ancient of empires. Goliris, from whose throne the kings and queens of that land wielded enormous power, subjecting continents and oceans to their will. Goliris, of which all had heard yet no one knew, no one in this part of the World.

  Only Gorel. And he remembered it still with every fibre of his being; for every cell in his body cried for his home. He remembered the vast halls of the palace, the scent of the sea beyond the black cliffs, the whispers of the eternal forest beyond the imperial city. He remembered sitting on his father’s knee on the throne.

  And he remembered the night it had all changed. How his life was stolen from him, how his fate changed forever. The traitors, his father’s wizards. What eldritch bargain they had made he didn’t know, but he had heard the screams of the dying, and then they came, and took him, and flung him from there and across the World.

  Now, forever exiled, he sought his home, his birth right, his throne. He would not rest until he found it.

  “Gorel of Goliris,” a voice said, and a tall bluish-green figure slid into the chair across the table. “As I live and breathe on land.”

  “Jericho Moon,” Gorel said. He stared at h
is old friend. The half-Merlangai’s eyes were hooded as though a film was cast over them. The gills at his neck opened and closed as he breathed. “I thought you were dead.”

  Jericho grinned. His teeth were long and sharp, and there were far too many of them. “I thought you were.”

  Gorel shrugged. “I see you got new teeth,” he said. He’d broken Jericho’s some time back, when they were both doing a job out on the sands of Meskatel. He’d had no choice at the time.

  “You like them?”

  “Who did the dental work?”

  “Some backroom teeth farmer in Tharat, after it flooded. You remember.”

  “Teeth farmer?”

  “They grow teeth on these coral reefs in the canals.”

  “All right, if you say so. Anyway, yes, I do remember Tharat. You were working for Kettle.”

  “The Dark Mage of the Black Tor,” Jericho Moon said, “should not be called Kettle.”

  “That’s how I knew him.” Then the gun was in Gorel’s hand and pressed into Jericho’s stomach under the table. “Do you still work for him, Jericho?”

  Jericho sighed. “No, Gorel. I’m freelance. Besides, I heard you’re the one who’s been doing his dirty work. Everyone’s heard of Waterfalling.”

  Gorel made the gun disappear. He did not wish to discuss Waterfalling, or how Kettle had used him there. Kettle, who he’d known first as an itinerant seller of pots and pans. In this disguise the Avian mage travelled the lands he was soon to conquer. Kettle, who had been Gorel’s lover... no, he did not wish to think of the Lord of the Black Tor. Though sooner or later he would have to.

  “So tell me about the ship,” he said instead.

  Jericho motioned for him to huddle closer.

  “Well?” Gorel said.

  His old companion grinned with those disturbing new teeth. “After I left Tharat and the Lord of the Black Tor’s employ,” Jericho said in a low voice, “I went back to the Down Below.”

  Outside, the sky slowly darkened, and the ocean waves lapped at the foundations of the docks.

  “Down there?” Gorel said.

  “I missed the breath of salt and the deep sea swell,” Jericho said. “And the great cities of the deeps—Nimrat, Moss Otul where the shark maidens dance, and the coral minarets of Issir-in-the-Gloom. While I was there—”

  “Loafing about?” Gorel said.

  “Doing a bit of this and that,” Jericho said, and smiled. “More of this than that, if truth be told. Took on a couple of jobs while I was there, to keep me in shell money.”

  “What kind of jobs?”

  “The usual. Let’s just say I won’t be welcome back in Little-Havfrue-Under-Waves any time soon. Not that I’d miss it, it’s a shithole. Anyway, on the last job I took, we broke into this old whaler’s house. The coral was dying all around us, the whole place was a rubbish tip. The old guy didn’t have much worth stealing that I could see, mostly books and old maps. I didn’t take any of that crap, but I did find a nice, long, very thin dagger. It was made of some black material I’d not seen before, Gorel. We had the old guy tied up to some rusted anchor out back and he was begging us to let him go, and the boss on the job sent me to shut him up. That’s how I came across it.”

  “The map?”

  “The map. The old guy kept promising me treasure if only I’d release him. He didn’t make much sense, but he said when he was very young, he was on a whaling expedition—you know whalers, they follow whale pods across the ocean and kind of, worship them or something—anyway he said they came across a black galleon ship, deep down. What happened after that I couldn’t really make it out, he said there were, well, ghosts, and things that killed the other men, and he alone survived. But he had a map, and he told me there was treasure. And there was this, Gorel.”

  He took out a long, thin, nasty-looking dagger and passed it under the table between them. Gorel held it in his lap. The colour of the metal sucked all the light from the room. Gorel stared.

  Etched on the handle was a seven-pointed star.

  The ancient symbol of lost Goliris.

  “Anyway, he told me where he hid the map and then I cut his throat with this very nice blade,” Jericho said. “Exquisite workmanship. And then we split.”

  “You think it’s true?” Gorel said. “There really is a ship?”

  Unspoken, on his mind, was the thought: a ship of Goliris. A ship from home.

  Jericho Moon said: “There’s only one way to find out.”

  3.

  It was a beautiful day when they sailed out of Vinay-Rin. The sea was as almost preternaturally calm, the sun shone in a clear blue sky, and gulls circled aft and cried overhead before diving to peck at the remnants of the dead Merlangai merchant still decomposing peacefully under the Sign of the Fish. As they passed the breakers and headed out into open sea, Jericho Moon held on to the ship’s railings, bent over, and threw up his lunch into the water.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Gorel said.

  “Just ate... something... bad.”

  Jericho retched again, and his bluish-green skin turned ever greener. Gorel suppressed a laugh.

  “I didn’t know your people got sea-sick,” he said.

  “We live... under the fucking sea,” Jericho said. “Not over it. It’s unnatural is what it is.”

  He tried to throw up again, but there was nothing left but a thin trickle of foul-smelling water. He spat into the sea.

  “A fucking disgrace,” he said, looking down sadly.

  The ship was named the Albatross—perhaps because it was large, ungainly on water, and its sails stained with soot. It had also survived twenty-two near-wrecks, several fires, and was once trapped for an entire winter in the enormous ice-sheets farther north, where the crew had been forced only somewhat reluctantly to eat each other. Or so the ship’s captain had informed them.

  Gorel didn’t know about ships any more than he knew about swords, and more to the point he didn’t give a damn. It was simply a means of conveniently getting from one place to another, just as a gun was a means of killing someone as quickly and efficiently as possible. He helped Jericho back to his feet.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll buy you breakfast.”

  He jumped out of the way just in time.

  Life on board ship moved at a different pace to anywhere else. Gorel mostly kept to himself. Jericho had his crew—some twenty of them, too close together on the ship. Merlangai riff-raff, salvagers for hire, who took every opportunity to jump overboard and swim alongside. Among them, Jericho Moon, with his half human heritage, stood out, bigger and bulkier, a slower swimmer. Gorel well knew why he himself was there. Jericho wasn’t sentimental. He didn’t need a friend. Gorel was, simply, his insurance.

  He’d interrogated Jericho in their cabin. “Exactly what did the old man say, before you cut his throat?”

  “Treasure.”

  “What kind of treasure.”

  “Old treasure. The best kind.”

  “How old a treasure?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “What happened to the others?”

  “Dead.”

  “What killed them?”

  “Things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Well, what else did he say?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Because you cut his throat.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Gorel massaged his temples. He took a pinch of dust. He had a limited supply. He was determined to measure it out. From time to time the craving flared, consuming him. In those moments he’d have given anything to have bestowed upon him once again the Black Kiss. He remembered the twin goddesses, Shalina and Shar, in that far-away land where the ghouls of the forest lived... Shalina and Shar, who kissed him and cursed him, forever.

  “Explain this map.”

  “I... can’t. It’s complicated.”

  “What are these lines?”

  “They’re w
hale migration routes.”

  “Of course they are,” Gorel said. “What are the large green areas?”

  “Poison weed fields.”

  “And the round red-coloured things?”

  “Volcanoes, I think. It’s an old map.”

  “Volcanoes,” Gorel said. “In the ocean. Really, Jericho.”

  Jericho looked at him and shook his head. “Wherever this is,” he said, “it’s a place of deep ocean volcanoes chockfull of deadly weed. It’s not an easy job, Gorel. It’s almost like this wreck, or whatever it is, isn’t so much lost as... well, hidden.”

  “A ship of Goliris.”

  “Presumably. Or how else do you explain the dagger?”

  “I don’t know. I am not sure I like it, Jericho.”

  “You don’t have to like it, you just have to survive it,” Jericho said, and smiled with those awful coral teeth. Gorel remembered him saying it before, back when they fought together in the Mosina Campaign. It was hard to believe they’d ever been so young, or survived this long.

  “Anyway this is why I’ve charted a... floaty ship. Trying to get there through the Down Below would likely be fatal. I guess the old guy and his crew got there following whales, but to be honest with you, Gorel, I don’t even like whales. Anyhow, all we have to do is find the approximate site, and then we’ll dive.”

  “How exactly are we going to find the approximate site?” Gorel said.

  Jericho stabbed his finger at the map. “Right here,” he said. “I think I know exactly where this is.”

  “What is that, a mountain?”

  Jericho sighed. “Yes, Gorel. It’s a mountain.”

  “There are mountains under the sea?”

  “Yes, Gorel. And do you know what you call such a mountain, if the peak rises above the water surface?”

  “What?” Gorel said.

  Jericho sighed again and brought out a second map. This one was made of regular paper, not the thick woven reeds used in the Down Below. He put one map over the other and pointed again, where two features converged, one on top of the other.

  “You call it an island,” he said.

  4.

  They sailed for days, and the continent was left far behind them. The next nearest continent remained a far longer journey. Gorel had once seen an atlas of the World, compiled over several centuries out of the often conflicting maps of various explorers, geographers, astronomers, and mages. Some claimed as many as twenty-seven continents, though many were little more than a sketched outline that was otherwise left blank. Others said sixteen, or twenty-one, or seven. The truth was, nobody knew. The atlas was painstakingly detailed in its attempt to capture the World.